


During that Summer (When Unicorns were Still Possible)

by Stultiloquentia



Category: Glee
Genre: Awkward First Times, Baking, F/M, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 11:03:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/pseuds/Stultiloquentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Kurt and Tina exchange wondering grins.  There are secret doorways in Lima.  If you can find them, you can find yourself in a car with four people, all of whom, for their own idiosyncratic reasons, own copies of <i>Top Hat</i>, one of whom is a beautiful, dark-eyed, passionate boy all for you." Set in the summertime between S2 and S3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	During that Summer (When Unicorns were Still Possible)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to misqueue and likeadeuce for all the encouragement.

Grace note-quick _Oh, so that's how it happens_ as a double dozen elaborately fantasized scenarios ( _I love you_ , and the crowd erupts with applause, _I love you_ , on a riverbank in Paris, _I love you_ , the moon is full, the porch is quiet, I bought this rose, I love you) resolve into this ordinary, red-sweatered boy in a busy coffee shop, propped on his fist and blinking at Kurt, lazy and pleased. As if it isn't even a milestone. Just a thing that's true. Kurt thinks, _And so it is_. He swallows his mouthful of mocha, feels its heat pool pleasantly in his stomach while a different kind of warmth settles deep within his bones. "I love you, too," he informs Blaine, who, graciously, does not reply with any variation of, "Duh."

"I love you," he repeats that night as they're parting, mostly to try it out, and feels his face split into a grin—the wide, embarrassing one, all teeth. And _now_ Blaine ducks his head and goes shy. Kurt waits him out, startled and charmed, content to stand on the stoop and admire the view of Blaine's eyelashes until Blaine musters and resurfaces to let Kurt see the rest of his smile. After a moment, Blaine seems to remember he's supposed to say words back, and he gets as far as, "I—" before Kurt stops his mouth with a kiss. It's Blaine's knees that go weak. Kurt's got him by the waist, though, tight and steady, and Blaine gets his arms around Kurt's neck and tucks in and _yields_ in no way Kurt could possibly explain, something in the dip of his jaw, the soft noise in his throat, and the way his spine lengthens beneath Kurt's palm like it's taking all he's got not to melt into a Scarlett O'Hara swoon.

They're going to have sex this year, Kurt thinks. When, TBD, and lord knows _where_ , and it will doubtless be ridiculous and teenaged and ten kinds of mortifying. Honestly it's already ridiculous to be having this revelation within hours of de-milestoning "I love you". None of this dispels his certainty. This boy. His body and mine. Yes.

He keeps the knowledge close, a small, fizzy secret inside his chest, and kisses his boyfriend deeply and carefully until Blaine's breathing starts to hitch.

"I'll see you soon," he whispers.

"'Night."

Blaine trots down the steps, spins on the driveway and walks himself backwards to his car. "—Love you, too!" he calls just before he rounds the hood, loud enough to be heard on the street, if anyone were around; maybe loud enough to be heard through Kurt's open living room windows. Kurt smirks at him helplessly. Blaine tosses and catches his keys, does a little Michael Jackson spin on his heel, and ducks into the Chevy.

Summer begins.

*

Tina visits Kurt at his dad's shop, where she finds him pining for Blaine, who works obnoxious hours at the park, and annoyed with himself, because actually sitting down and teaching himself to score a musical is harder than trolling gossip blogs for inspiration.

"I'm thinking of getting a tattoo," she tells Kurt, sitting on the picnic table out back, swinging their feet and sipping iced coffee.

Kurt eyes her like she's suggested cutting off an ear. "Good God, why?"

"Because, because... I don't know, I just. What. You don't like tattoos?"

"They're permanent," says Kurt.

She fixes him with a _no shit, Sherlock_ stare, and gets one right back. "Jeez, since when are you the Voice of Mom?"

"Circa 2001," he deadpans, but now he's just being an asshole. She kicks his shin.

"Oww," he whines, "don't scuff me!"

"You're wearing coveralls."

"That's no excuse to abuse them. They can't help being what they are." Kurt bends ostentatiously to pet smooth the leg of his pants and straighten the cuffs over his giant goddamned steel-toed boots. Then he tilts his head up and pins her again with his beady eyes. "So?"

She snorts at him, then deflates. It's an increasingly familiar problem, blurting things around Kurt, then getting stuck on his hook when he wants more info. Pain in her ass. "That's the point, you know? The permanence. I just—" She squirms, trying to articulate what's still somewhat fuzzy in her own mind. "I love playing with clothes and hair and stuff, switching it up, trying new things. But sometimes I feel like, 'Who's the person underneath all that? What's—where's the part of me that's gonna last?'"

"You think you're going to coax her out of hiding by waving a tattoo gun in her face?" Kurt's words are tart, but his tone surprisingly mild.

"No! I know who I am, I know who I want to be. I do. It feels like a way of owning that, of _trusting_ myself with—well, with my own skin, I guess."

"So it's about the decision, then, not the design?"

"Both. Well, it'll be about both when I actually _do_ it."

What she does not say to Kurt is how many other things in her life feel impermanent, and how frightening that is sometimes. Kurt, she knows, has at times counted on, _relied_ upon the cold, hard truth that nothing lasts: it's the source of both his patience and his daunting ambition. But Tina looks at the summer ahead of her, two short months of freedom, and then a single year beyond that with Mike at her side, and Kurt and the other seniors, and then everything will scatter. And fade? She doesn't know, she doesn't _know_ how to keep these people in her heart, under her skin the way she needs to.

She doesn't know her design, yet, but she's pretty sure she's got her theme.

Kurt looks at her for a long moment. Finally he just says, "Well, your body, your call," and gives her a small smile. Then he turns his nose up and sniffs, "But I feel you should know: Lagerfield would not approve."

"Who's that, a beer maker?" Tina teases.

"Besides, you can't get a tattoo in Ohio until you're eighteen—at least from any establishment I'd set foot in without my hazmat suit, which defeats the purpose—unless your mother's there to hold your hand and sign a form explaining 'the manner in which the procedure will be performed and methods for proper care of the affected body area.' Please, please let me be a fly on the wall when you broach this subject to Deborah Cohen."

"And how do _you_ know all this stuff word for word, mister?"

"I looked it up after Blaine threatened to get my name in hearts on his ass."

Tina hoots and Kurt sips his coffee, poised and smug as a sphinx. "What'd you tell him?"

"Not to mess with perfection!" They nod at each other solemnly.

She's oddly stunned, though, by the thought of Blaine thinking about that, too, even just playing around. Not the ass part. Obviously. But the _name_. God, how fearlessly (stupidly, naïvely, _gloriously_ ) romantic would you have to be?

"So," Tina says after a pause, "you've seen Blaine's ass."

"Tina!" Aha, there goes his poise. "Um. Sort of?"

" _Sort_ of."

"In swim trunks?" Kurt goes a little pink. "We've changed in front of each other. I mean, adjacent to each other. In the same room."

She grins at him and points and flexes her toes, admiring the ruby red polish (retro!) that Mike actually noticed and commented on and Kurt himself had recommended. "Do you want to?"

Kurt tips over, nose into her shoulder. "He's never around. How am I supposed to work up the chutzpah to put my hands—when he's—"

"Aw, you'll figure it out. I have infinite faith in your chutzpah." Kurt sniffs, rueful, but still smiling. Then he rolls his forehead and glints up at her.

"You and Mike?"

One more summer, one more chance to be stupid and romantic and naïve, and then.... "I think soon."

*

Summer Blaine is sunnier, younger than the put-together boy Tina met last fall. Maybe it's the sight of his bare knees and dangerously dipping shorts as he and Finn bend over a disassembled lawnmower in Kurt's driveway. Maybe it's the look on his face when he catches sight of Kurt, like Kurt is a Disney prince and Blaine a six-year-old girl on her first trip to Disneyland.

But then Kurt twists or stretches, and Blaine's gaze drops and his lips part, and _that_ is not the look of a six-year-old girl, staring at her friend that way. Kurt never seems to notice, even while he's sneaking his own lustful glances at Blaine in almost perfect syncopation, and it's funny and kind of wonderful to see this thing blossoming, _becoming_ , between the two of them. It's weird to think of Kurt that way, as a sexual creature—he's mostly so prim and contained—but she giggles about it with Mike and Mike says it's always the buttoned-up ones.

Tina is determined to make the most of their summer, before camp starts gobbling up their weekdays. She'd like to know Blaine a little better. Kurt has confided that he's trying to lure his boyfriend over to McKinley next year, and Tina figures having more than one person there to name "friend" is a good place to start. So she organizes a road trip to Cincinnati to see a dance competition.

*

They end up taking Kurt's Navigator despite its terrible gas mileage, because Kurt loves to drive and is also okay maybe a bit of a control freak.

Within an hour on the road, Tina leans over to Kurt and stage-whispers, "Ten bucks they're making out before we hit Dayton." Kurt glances at his mirror. Mike and Blaine are turned toward each other on the bench seat of the SUV, arms slung out over the backrest. Mike has doffed his sneakers and folded his legs up like a giant spider; Blaine has his legs crossed, one foot bobbing in Mike's direction like the facing page of "Cosmo Girl's Guide to Flirting". They're neck-deep in a debate about Eleanor Powell.

The conversation had started with the perfectly respectable, dude-approved subject of video games, which had sustained them handily through to Wapakoneta. There had been some wallowing in nostalgia for great games of the nineties, and the conversation had eventually rambled into the subject of nostalgia in general, which had Kurt chiming in about fashion, and Tina trying to google Hessians (not to be confused with heifers) from the middle of cow country. By Sidney they're bonding over shifting standards of masculinity in old movies, and getting really quite emphatic with each other about whether Fred Astaire was, wasn't, or should have been threatened by the tap dancing BAMFitude of various of his leading ladies.

Kurt and Tina exchange wondering grins. There are secret doorways in Lima. If you can find them, you can find yourself in a car with four people, all of whom, for their own idiosyncratic reasons, own copies of _Top Hat_ , one of whom is a beautiful, dark-eyed, passionate boy all for you.

*

They stay with Blaine's grandmother, a chemistry prof at UC who owns a house on the outskirts of Cincinnati. She flings open the door at soon as they pull up, releasing two galumphing basset hounds onto the lawn. "Squirt!" she yells on seeing Blaine, who grins ruefully and jogs up to get his hug and a smacking kiss on the cheek.

Mrs. Anderson greets everyone else with a vigorous handshake and an intense, blue gaze, interrogates them briefly about their schedule for the weekend, then drops a selection of takeout menus in Blaine's palm, tells him he knows where the linen closet is, and vanishes out the door with a purple hat and a large, hemp handbag, leaving the four teenagers blinking in her wake.

After a late dinner (Vietnamese subs stuffed with daikon and chilis and pickled carrots) Blaine leads them into the downstairs den. There's a sofabed, but they opt to blow up air mattresses and all sleep on the floor.

"Your gran won't come down to check on us?" Tina wonders, arranging blankets and realizing slightly more viscerally than she had before that she's about to sleep next to Mike for the first time ever. 

"I doubt it," says Blaine. "She thinks my parents smother me." Kurt barks out a laugh, indicating what he thinks of _that_ assessment.

"How'd you get _your_ dad to agree, Kurt?" Tina asks.

Kurt, slower at arranging his bedding just so than the rest of them, finally crawls into his nest and intones darkly, "I had to swear we'd be in separate sleeping bags this time."

" _This_ time?"

"Oh my God, I'm sorry!" Blaine wails, and smacks his face into his pillow.

Kurt settles onto his elbows, flapping his hands as he describes their first ill-fated sleepover. "I spent the whole night huddled at the very edge of the bed, hating you." Blaine's pillow gives up a muffled puppyish whine. Kurt's sparkling eyes soften, and the smile is audible in his voice as he says, "All's forgiven," and darts in to peck Blaine on the cheek.

When Blaine surfaces, leaning after Kurt's kiss, it's to find Mike and Tina both watching them intently, Tina with a peculiar tenderness in her eyes. "What?" he inquires, a little poutily.

Tina hesitates for just a moment before saying, "I've never seen you two kiss before."

Blaine slides his eyes sideways. Kurt blinks at him, blinks at Tina, blinks back at Blaine.

"We kiss," Blaine says.

"We're not exhibitionists," Kurt snaps. He has pulled into himself a little. Blaine's hand chases after him and circles his wrist delicately.

"Kurt, no, I didn't mean—" She tries to regroup. "You just have such a different couple vibe than, like, Rachel and Finn, they kiss _all_ the _time_ in public and it's, like—"

"Slobbery," Mike mutters, and even Kurt can't help snorting.

"You know why we're private," Blaine continues with an odd gentleness. "It's easier if we can romanticize it." 

And _that_ brings Kurt back out of himself to stare at Blaine.

"I meant," Tina says after a moment, trying to match Blaine's tone, but mostly coming out awkward, "that I felt, um, honored? That you felt safe enough with us. To be yourselves. I liked. I liked seeing you like that."

"Oh," says Kurt. There's a pause.

"We should all go to Pride!" Mike blurts. Everyone turns to blink at him. "You know, like, a pride parade? Isn't there one in Columbus?"

"We're, um, actually missing it, I think," Blaine says. "Like, now."

"Oh."

"Would you want to go to one, though? I would. Next year, we could organize a thing...."

Kurt's not sure why it feels weird and embarrassing to admit that, yes, he would like that, desperately much. "My whole life is a pride parade," he grumbles instead.

"Well, that's a big, fat lie. You wouldn't be caught dead in that much pleather."

"True; there is not enough pride in the world to justify the pleather."

*

It's one of the best sleepovers of Blaine's life. Different from late nights at Dalton, which held their fair share of sophomoric philosophizing interrupted by sing-alongs; more intimate, with their four heads propped close together down in the just-adequate space between his gran's TV stand and awful floral sofa. He's sort of glad that he and Kurt seem to have managed to cheat their way out of the whole awkward "hello yes these are my pajamas" bit by doing it while Blaine was drunk. Kurt looks relaxed and, to Blaine's eyes, effortlessly sensual in his piped silk. Blaine, not knowing what to expect from Mike, is keeping it simple with plaid bottoms and a Dalton Athletics tee, but he kind of can't wait to do this again and show off his real pajamas to Kurt. 

The conversation meanders from absurd to serious and back again, never quite at that hushed, after-midnight place of soul-baring that sometimes happens, for they don't all know each other quite well enough for that, but they make headway. Pride parades, to parades, to family history and national pride....

"If you could design your own float, what would it be?"

"How about, like, the gay marriage float, with Kurt and Blaine in tuxes singing duets from the top of a giant wedding cake."

"Singing cake toppers! Yesss, achievement unlocked!"

"But what would you sing?"

Blaine begins to hum at the same instant Kurt says, "Cole Porter," grinning even as he sounds like he's disgusted anyone even had to ask.

*

"Do you? Actually love this country?"

Blaine's thought about the question often enough to have an answer ready. "I love... what it ought to be and could be."

Kurt smiles at him, recognizing the quotation from school, and murmurs, "Nerd."

"You?" Blaine asks Kurt. Kurt doesn't answer right away. Blaine thinks he knows what he'll say, and then rethinks.

He recalls meeting Burt Hummel for the first time—properly, that is, at their house, sober, and in possession of an invitation to dinner—expecting the bearish, taciturn mechanic and finding a political junkie. "I taught him how to stream C-SPAN last week," Kurt had stage-whispered. "He's obsessed." He remembers being a little flustered and ashamed of himself, confronted with his own snotty stereotyping, even if nobody knew it but him.

"Painfully," Kurt says.

*

"We could play Truth or Dare."

"Tinaaaa."

"Would You Rather?"

"..."

"Cliff, Bang, Marry?"

"I'm cliffing _you_ if you don't shut up and let me get enough sleep to hit the flea markets early tomorrow."

"Damn, and here I thought my chances of banging or marrying you were so good."

"Goodnight, Tina!"

*

Tina awakens near sunrise, as she often does when sleeping in an unfamiliar place. The light is a soothing, secretive gray, just enough to make out that Blaine, across from her, is also awake, propped on one folded arm as he looks at Kurt, who has rolled onto his back and flung an arm over his head, knuckles nearly brushing _Mike's_ hair, the only tufty sign there's a fourth party in the room. Tina can't fault Blaine for creeping; Kurt really does look angelic that way. If Tina tries to sleep on her back, she snores hard enough to register on Richter scales in Mongolia.

" _Hi_ ," she breathes. Blaine turns and blinks into a sweet, closed-mouthed smile, then laughs quietly when Tina pushes both arms out of her sleeping bag and sticks her butt in the air in a massive, animal stretch. When she's finished and peering at him again, he tilts his head toward the stairs and raises his eyebrows.

They creep up, Blaine flicking on the kitchen light while Tina veers off to the bathroom. When she rejoins him, he's pouring coffee beans into a little electric grinder and cracking a yawn, the tail end of which he covers sheepishly with his hand.

"Can you fill that to the...six cup mark?" he murmurs, nodding at the pot next to him. His voice is still a little raspy. "You drink coffee, right?"

"Sure," says Tina. "Mike'll have tea, though, if you've got any."

"Probably," says Blaine. He pauses to buzz the beans and tip them into the percolator. "And there's—actually I don't know if there's orange juice in the fridge, but there's carrot-orange-mango hippie juice, which you're welcome to. And other stuff. I was thinking biscuits." The last part is muffled by a cupboard door as Tina turns back from the sink and gets an eyeful of _his_ ass, upended in pursuit of—apparently baking supplies. He surfaces with a flour canister tucked into his elbow and his hands wrapped around several smaller tins.

"You can bake?"

Blaine's smile is conspiratorial. "Kurt doesn't know, either. I'm pretty sure he assumes I'm as useless in the kitchen as the rest of his family." Then his body goes still for a second—noticing how the end of his own sentence turned out, she thinks.

She covers for him. "But you eat dinner over there all the time."

"Yes, and he puts a wooden spoon in my hand and says, 'Stir,' and I am not a complete idiot." They grin together, and then Blaine points over Tina's head and says, "Mugs," and then he's long-arming a bowl out of a different cupboard and spinning the top off the flour.

Blaine really doesn't bake like Kurt bakes. Tina knows; she's participated in Kurt's Christmas cookie marathons. Kurt's a precisionist, self-taught in solitude by way of The Food Network and Youtube tutorials: ingredients assembled and ranked on the counter like a military tactics table, baking powder leveled off against the lip of the tin. Blaine looks like he learnt from between someone's knees. He's got a dog-eared recipe card nearby, but he's not really checking it. Or measuring. Like Kurt, though, he seems confident about the state of the dough beneath his hands, and it's only a couple minutes before he's plopping a neat ball onto the counter and reaching for a knife. Then he huffs to himself, reconsiders, and rummages in a drawer for a handsome, copper cookie cutter.

Oven loaded, they fill their mugs and move a few feet over to the kitchen island, chatting lazily about family and food lore. The kitchen warms, and the sun glints grumpily through the parsley and aloe on the windowsill, and even though they both have best beloveds crashed out downstairs, Tina feels mellow and domestic and damned near perfect right now, parked on a stool beside this lovely guy, trading tales about great breakfasts they have known and purring into seriously quality cups of coffee.

Soon enough the mingling smells of coffee and baked goods penetrate Kurt's dreams and lure him up the stairs, and that's good, too, seeing him sweet and squinting in the doorway with his ridiculous silk pajama pants and floppy hair. She beams at him, and Blaine beams at him, and Blaine slips off his stool and Kurt wanders over and kisses him good morning. Not salaciously, but not perfunctorily, either. Blaine's hand splays out over Kurt's hip, and Kurt's long fingers skritch once, gently, at the nape of Blaine's neck. Tina bites her lip and resists the urge to just—stand up, herself, and _hug_ them.

And then the oven timer dings and Kurt pulls away and does an actual assessment of the kitchen, quick and suddenly quite lucid: deep, inquisitive inhale, spotting of the dirty bowl and pastry cutter by the sink, the tiny smudge of flour on Blaine's shirt. Blaine winks at him and says, "Tina, could you grab plates?"

They sit together for close to an hour, spreading jam on biscuits and hashing out their plans for the day. Kurt wants to get in some shopping before the crowds wake up, so he and Blaine will drop Tina and Mike off near the festival before heading off to their flea markets, then they'll catch up in the afternoon. This settled, they decide it's time to go pounce on Mike.

Tina takes this plan extremely literally, and Blaine joyfully follows suit, and then all traces of decorum are lost when Kurt's clapping and " _up and at 'em!_ "s are defeated by Mike's very long arms catching him around the knees and yanking him down into the puppy pile. Some unexpected kissing ensues. Mike, for reasons known only to himself, gets Kurt loudly on the side of the mouth, and Kurt's shocked expression is so funny that everybody decides they'd better get in on that, and then it's more or less a free-for-all.

"You taste like plums?" Mike inquires of Tina.

"Jam," she says. "Come have some." And she hauls him up, dislodging Kurt, who's sitting on his feet. And they brush themselves off, laugh at each other's hair, and separate to rummage for clothes, do the dishes, pour the last of the coffee, and leave a note on Blaine's grandmother's mirror, advising that they have left her one baking powder biscuit and one tablespoon of plum preserves.

*

The last group up is two guys, a girl, a question mark, and a woman off to the side with a lime green electric cello. They start crouched in a square, perfectly still beneath a thin, dry little rain of sawed sixteenth notes. An arm lifts somewhere in the center of the group, languorously, like the neck of a swan, and then a second one, and then the smallest dancer, the androgynous one, clasps both tightly and _rolls_ upward in a slow-motion somersault, perpendicular to the rest of the universe until—she?—is balanced above them in a handstand. The cellist taps her loop pedal and the dancer scissors out into a spin, releasing and re-catching the stiff, strong, perfectly placed arms of her partner. It looks like she's break dancing, but on the backs of the others. They add levels, tossing and torquing her, placing palms for her to rebound against as she tumbles over and over, legs swinging, shoulders flexed. The precision and trust on display is jaw-dropping, and Tina has no idea where she's getting her momentum. Finally the cellist loops again and the sound flings itself out like a crazy quilt and the dancers fling themselves after it, androgygirl straight into the air. She flips once, knees tight to chest, and lands on the ground on one palm and the balls of her feet like the hero of a videogame. The crowd roars.

The rest of the piece is more spread out, but no less kinetic. And it's definitely still street dancing, hip hop, breaking, tumbling—Tina doesn't know enough about what she's looking at to name it—but they continue to do it with more contact, and way more lifts, than anyone else she's seen today. The other troupes were in sync; these four are _enmeshed_.

In affect they're nothing like glee club. Their energy is grittier and more muscular even before you get around to the huge thighs on the female dancer. Tina recognizes something, though, in the attention they pay to each other, their hooking glances and bitten-back grins as they make art together on the scuffed portable floor under the hot late-afternoon sun.

Beside her, Mike....Mike looks the same way he did the first time she showed him Fred Astaire dancing with a hat stand.

The piece ends, the crowd erupts and clamors appreciation. One of the dancers grabs a mic and shouts their thanks and the name of their youtube channel, and then there are bodies flowing around them, down the risers and bunching in chatty clusters and breaking away into the evening in search of new entertainment.

Mike still looks sort of stunned. "We should talk to them," Tina decides.

"What?" He shakes himself a bit and blinks down at her. Oh, no, no, we shouldn't bother th—"

"Why not? We drove all this way; maybe we can get some networking out of it. Make some friends!"

" _Friends?_ But they're—" _Big city dancers_ , real _dancers, so much cooler than me_ , Tina fills in.

Tina looks Mike in the eye, spins on her heel and beelines for the cellist, who is stowing her instrument. "Ti— Wait!" she hears him yelp behind her. She doesn't stop, just walks straight up to the girl, sticks her hand out and says, no stutter, "Hey. That was amazing."

The cellist flips her dreads over one shoulder, the better to squint up at Tina, and flashes a crooked-toothed grin. "Thank you."

Tina pushes on. "My boyfriend and I are from Lima, where there's, like, nothing like this. I've never seen a dance-off that wasn't on youtube...."

*

Tina only begins to grok the magnitude of what she's done when, a week later, Mike hasn't stopped talking about it. They're in Tina's mom's car, pulling away from a drive-thru on the way home from camp, and it's a good thing Tina knows Mike's usual order, because he had a hard enough time pausing for _her_ to deal with the food, never mind make a decision for himself. And Mike? Not exactly a chatterbox.

The smell of French fries right under his nose does slow him down, though. Before extracting his own meal he carefully unwraps one side of Tina's burger and tucks it in her hand.

"Marty said sh—I mean zie could talk to me about auditioning in Chicago. Do you think... I mean, ballet school?" He laughs incredulously. "I never considered...."

"Okay, I know where we're going for my birthday."

"What?"

"Columbus has dance companies. We're gonna go get ourselves some culture!"

"Woo!"

"And you should borrow Brittany's camcorder. You should tape that hip hop/ _High Society_ mash-up you were messing around with, turn it into a full length thing. I bet Marty would look at it for you."

"I still can't believe you did that, just marched up and introduced yourself like no big deal. That was so badass."

"I'm like your wingman!"

"Wingwench!" The hand with the hamburger smacks enthusiastically into the window. Mike stops short, beholds the squelch of mustard and ketchup he's left behind, stuffs the rest of the burger into his mouth in three bites and contorts himself halfway into the back seat, hunting for napkins.

Tina concentrates on driving while giggling.

Mike finds a KitKat along with the napkins, which he breaks in half and offers to Tina. She glances over, sees his t-shirt still riding up on his waist from when he twisted, the strip of smooth skin, his boxers peeking up above his jeans. Blue, with airplanes.

 _This boy_ , she thinks. _His body, his beautiful body and mine. Yes._

*

Sex, then. Her man is not intimidatingly huge, lucky for him, but nor is he packing a packing peanut, so to speak. Tina is not interested in over-romanticizing her virginity, least of all its anatomical technicality. She is not going into this (or, to put a finer point on it, _this_ is not going into _her_ ) without some sort of trial run.

She is not walking into Lima's single bedraggled sex shop, nor is she using her mother's credit card to take a spin around goodvibes.com.

Vegetables it is.

Tina stands in the produce aisle at Meijer's and stares dolefully at her options. Who knew cucumbers were so confusing? Waxed? Unwaxed? The English cukes are shrink-wrapped, which inevitably makes Tina think of condoms. Condoms! She should probably get condoms for this enterprise. She's probably only going to need one or two, but the whole point is to be able to use condoms _with Mike_ , so she should try to get a kind that he will like. She should probably call him up to confer. But then he'll know she's buying condoms, and she isn't ready for him to know that yet. So. Just pick something nice and simple and...not flavored like peach schnapps...and if whatever's left after you've finished your independent study doesn't work for the boyfriend, then you're out all of ten bucks.

Lube. Oh, god, should she? She doesn't think it'll be a problem; her own body is, uh, very functional in that regard, but it can't hurt to have it on hand. In case of nerves.

Tina debates for ten minutes, then makes her selection in haste when the gangly clerk at the other end of the aisle begins to look like he's thinking of offering assistance. She plunks her collection of prophylactics and salad fixings on the conveyor belt, beams a shade too broadly at the cashier, and swings out into the sunlight, feeling, if not in every way adult, then close enough for jazz.

*

She washes her cucumber. Reads the instructions provided by the condom manufacturer, cross-references them with _Scarleteen_.

Locks her bedroom door, even though nobody's expected home for hours, climbs onto her bed with her purchases, hitches her skirts and....

She thinks of what she's doing and what she must look like, her intense concentration face that Mike delights in teasing her for. Tina flops onto her belly and howls with laughter into her pillow.

*

It doesn't fit. And it—nope—really isn't going to fit any time soon. It's stupid and frustrating. When she thinks about something that big filling her up, she loves it. She can _imagine_ being full that way, and god, she _wants_ it, it turns her on, it makes her ache. Stupid hymen, stupid stupid argh. She feels tears pricking, and grants herself permission to go all melodramatic for a minute. What if she's freakishly small, or misshapen, warped? Then she remembers something she's read about the shape of the body actually significantly changing when you're turned on. Okay. She flips onto her back and wiggles down into her sheets. Bites her lip. Runs her hand down her stomach.

*

A week and several stealth trips to the compost bin later, it occurs to Tina that she's been taking all reasonable steps except having a conversation with her boyfriend.

*

Even at midsummer, Kurt keeps all his clothes on.

Waiting for the group to assemble for a movie night, Blaine and Finn have stripped off their tops to chase a Frisbee through the lawn sprinkler in the back yard. Blaine can't kick a soccer ball to save his life, but he has a wicked Frisbee arm and is sending Finn straight through the densest part of the spray, every time. Running tackle and grass stains inevitable in five...four...three....

Kurt lounges on the porch, looking like Robert Redford in white linen. When Blaine finally appears in front of him, puppy-scuffed, panting, and damp, Kurt looks him up and down, slowly, and even though it's the sandpapery gaze of judgment, complete with eyebrows, it hits Blaine all at once that he's being stared at, at close range, by his boyfriend, and he feels those clear eyes on his bare self and feels a bright, hot sparkle of arousal.

He hides it behind his cheekiest grin and nods toward the erstwhile battlefield. "You know you liked the view."

Kurt's eyebrow only arches further, even as his ears go pink. Blaine leans in, ostensibly to grab the towel Kurt's unearthed, and teases, "We're all out of balance, now. You've seen so much more skin than I have." For that he gets the towel flung over his head and a shove between the shoulder blades toward the kitchen door. Stumbling and still grinning—he saw Kurt's gaze dip before his view went dark—Blaine goes to clean up.

A few days later, they're in Kurt's bedroom, Kurt propped against his pillows with a book of staff paper, Blaine sprawled out with a novel. Blaine glances over and sees Kurt staring at him and toying with the top button of his short-sleeved Oxford.

Kurt licks his lips and says, "Blaine. Unbutton my shirt."

Blaine's brain lurches, like his body is a car parked on an incline and somebody's just turned the ignition and popped the parking brake. He scrambles up and over and sets a hand on Kurt's ankle. "Oh, God, Kurt, I was _teasing_. You don't—I never want you to do anything, show me anything, that you're not completely comfortable with." He forces his eyes to say fixed on Kurt's, and not drop to the fine, strong lines of his collarbones vanishing beneath breezy cotton. "I'm not your boyfriend because I think I'm going to get— _skin_ out of it."

Blaine realizes eventually that, while he's been babbling, Kurt's been thumbing buttons open. The shirt lies closed on his chest, but now all it would take is—

Blaine straddles Kurt's knees. Takes the shirt's edges in his fingers, so delicately he's not even touching Kurt's skin, and softly parts the fabric. He finds pale, smooth skin, dusted with more hair than had shown up in Blaine's fantasies, but, God, so not a problem. He rests his hands lightly on Kurt's denim-covered hipbones and just stares.

"Can I?" he murmurs, motioning vaguely, and Kurt nods, and Blaine pushes his palms over Kurt's shoulders, pushing the fabric away as he goes. His shoulders are so good Blaine actually groans. Kurt's breath comes out in a huff, half laughter, half shyness. Neither boy moves to free Kurt's trapped arms from his sleeves.

Blaine puts both hands flat on Kurt's chest, and they just sit like that for a minute, Blaine feeling Kurt breathe. Kurt's heart thumps beneath his palm.

Blaine swallows. "Kurt, I am literally getting hard just, just because you are sitting here _breathing_." Kurt's face floods with heat. "So I think maybe you were right all along and I should let you do up your buttons again."

Several expressions dart across Kurt's face, too quick to follow, before he settles on a small, pink-cheeked smile.

"Let's go downstairs and make granitas." So they do that.

Later, though.

"Blaine," says Kurt. He's not looking at him. He's looking down to where his thumbnail is poking at the window well of the car door he's leaning on. "I was getting hard, too."

Blaine musters all of his strength and produces a vowel sound.

Kurt ducks his head inside the car and kisses—well, he's rushed and not really looking where he's going, so it ends up being Blaine's cheek and the side of his nose, because Blaine's turning his head at the same time— _no, no, oily!_ he thinks distractedly—and then retreats just as fast. "Um, goodnight!" Kurt mumbles, and Blaine catches one bright glint of blue beneath his lashes before he straightens and turns and scampers (who knew long-thighed, graceful Kurt could _scamper_?) back up to the house. He turns again at the steps to wave, shy-mouthed with his lips tucked under his teeth. Blaine stares at him through the windshield, both hands on the wheel. Kurt stays put. Blaine drives.

Later, though. Hardness. It's acknowledged. Well, it was acknowledged before on some level, he supposes; it's not like they've been doing nothing but kissing each other's oily noses for the past four months. But now it's acknowledged that it's acknowledged? And it's a small change, because they're still not doing anything about it, but it does change them. Knowing they turn each other on. It's good.

There are conversations they should probably be having, conversations neither of them quite knows how to begin. In the meantime, Blaine tries to let his hands talk for him. He cradles the back of Kurt's skull so carefully when they kiss, and slides his palm down to the small of his back and stops there, stroking with his thumb. _My body likes your body_ , he tries to say, in the most patient, respectful and gentlemanly way possible. _Yes._

*

Sam leaves town, abruptly and ungracefully, at the end of July. With a day and a half's notice, Mike throws together a party, "Hey, no, man, it's cool, just come down to the beach for a few hours, it'll be really low key, just give people a chance to say goodbye, yeah?" Half the glee club is out of town or can't get off work. Kurt and Blaine come. Mercedes doesn't.

Mike cashes in a favor with one of the camp directors and secures a slice of lakefront with a fire pit. They spend a couple hours splashing around in the shallows, then break open a pack of wieners and a tub of foil-wrapped hot-pockety things from Kurt that taste heavenly after they've been sitting under the coals for a few minutes. It's really too hot for a fire, but Mike's grateful for it for the way he knows it's going to tint the memory: flame-shadow mingling with the low, golden slide of the sun to paint the hands and faces of his friends the exact color of nostalgia.

The guitars come out. Tina is the first person brave enough to break into the vegan marshmallows, exclaiming over the little cartoon mascot with the bowtie on the package. A debate ensues over the rightness of anthropomorphizing food you're about to eat, Blaine pro-bowtied sugar products, Kurt contra. "It's morbid and creepifying!" Sam shouts, and Kurt doubts whether creepifying is actually a word and Sam throws Mike the heartbroken glance of a geek surrounded by mundanes. Mike shakes his head gravely in sympathy. Tina extracts her oozing experiment from the fire and eats it like Godzilla, Puck providing sinister B-movie chords and Finn the squeaky "Help! Help!" voice. Then Rachel points out that the whole point of vegan marshmallows is they're _not_ morbid and creepifying and then Tina vouches that they're also actually pretty tasty, and then everybody dives into the bag, and Puck segues into "Black, Black Heart."

Tina looks gorgeous, smiling and singing along in between licking sugar off her fingers. She catches his eye and smirks, bold. Mike, inventorying himself, realizes he's staring, at her lush mouth, her shiny fingers, feels his lips part and his tongue curl restlessly against his teeth. Tina's smile deepens knowingly and she sucks her thumb back into her mouth, and good grief, now they're having a _moment_ right there in front of their friends. Briefly, out of the corner of his eye, he can see Blaine lifting an amused eyebrow—but it feels good, warm and contained and safe, this fleeting flare of connection between the two of them, within the larger circle of friends who made Mike and Tina possible in the first place.

Blaine hands the guitar he's been messing with off to Sam and climbs in between Kurt's legs. Kurt squawks at the sudden abundance of limbs and hastily sets aside his drink, but his arms come around his boyfriend easily, confidently, like they've been there before, and they're settled with no more than a hitch and a wiggle, forearms folding together, Blaine's head tipping back against Kurt's jaw.

When Mike, in days gone by, has tried to imagine Kurt as someone's boyfriend, he's put him in the role of—of—well, when he tries to put it into words, it sounds terrible—the little one? The inside spoon, the—no. And evidently: no. Kurt is tall, these days. Not buff, but slim and balanced as a blade. In profile, his sideburns give him an air of old-school, matinee idol masculinity, like a black-and-white movie star. Blaine, snoozing, clearly feels there's no safer embrace in the world.

Mike's taking a walk up to the bathroom in the rec center when he rounds a bush and nearly collides with Dave Karofsky. He's hand in hand with a girl of seven or eight, chubby and brown like Dave himself.

Mike hasn't seen Dave, or thought about him, since school ended. Before, actually—he thinks it might have been the Monday after prom, when Kurt had shown up at school wearing purple (" _Porphyry_ , Finn!"), and Puck had been overheard asking him where he'd got his kilt, because it looked badass and Puck thought the airflow might feel nice.

Mike and Puck had walked into a bathroom between lunch bells and found it occupied by Karofsky and a bunch of hockey players. "— _little pussy bitch queen, Dave? Dumped your ass when you couldn't—_ "

"Who, Hummel?" Puck had cut in, shouldering his way to the urinals. "In case the big-ass slow dance wasn't enough clue, Hummel's already got himself a hot private school boyfriend. Fuck would he want this dickface for?"

"Shu'thefuckup," Karofsky had muttered, but he'd taken the path opened by Puck with an expression somewhere neighboring gratitude and lumbered for the door.

Mike and Dave sidle around each other, awkwardly, and continue in their respective directions—until Mike turns around and stalks him back to the beach. He doesn't catch him up, just watches as the pair makes their way past the New Directions. Watches Kurt raise his hand from Blaine's stomach and wave.

The others, those who notice, seem willing to take their cue from him: a few heads lift, but their gazes stay neutral, even disinterested. Sam's rhythm on the guitar never slips. The song is something folksy and a little melancholy that Mike doesn't know, but it suits Sam's voice. " _And they took us as we came / no one even asked our name / just Americans in corduroys, kissing / in the middle of the street._ "

The little girl with Karofsky swings his hand, and he trudges off, bound for some or other of the dozen campfires scattered in congenial isolation along the darkening beach.

*

Kurt's favourite thing to do with a lake is lounge atop it, on something garish and inflatable, with a hole to put his fruity drink in. He knows how to avoid drowning, can approximate most of the basic strokes, but he's never been a water baby.

Blaine apparently is. Blaine can maintain an eggbeater that keeps his whole chest dry. Blaine can launch himself like a whale, then plummet to the bottom of the lake like a loon. His favourite stroke is butterfly.

*

They're reclining on a blanket on the grass, cheesy-romantic with plastic wine glasses and fruit juice. Mike flops on his back and rolls Tina on top of him and suddenly his thigh is pressing upward right between her legs and she's insanely turned on—like, more turned on than this level of contact should warrant. She loops her arms around his neck and shuts her eyes and tries to resist the urge to grind. They're in public, broad daylight, for Pete's sake. Granted, there aren't many people around.

"Mike?" she whispers.

"Mmmmm."

"Doyouthinkweshoulddoit?"

*

"I don't get why it's such a big deal!" Tina huffs. "It's so outdated, the whole damned thing. Just another way of controlling women's bodies."

"And braaaains," Yan interjects.

"It's a simple personal decision and one of _infinite_ steps in the evolution of one's personal sexuality, yet imbued with this massive cultural significance and false binarization based on willful and hypocritical misconceptions of feminine virtue, not to mention _anatomy_. I mean, it's body parts interlocking. What's so—what's the enormous difference between sex and, like, oral? Why is _that_ the big milestone?"

"Well, you don't know, do you?" says Yan. "Maybe you'll have sex and it'll be this giant epiphany and suddenly the massive cultural significance will make perfect sense."

"Hmpf," says Tina, collecting her lemonade and thumping into a kitchen chair. Yan unprops herself from the counter and follows suit. Tina glances at her oldest friend and co-counselor. They've known each other since they were four. Phlegmatic and literal-minded, she might be the only one of Tina's friends capable of hearing the word "vagina" without hiding under the table.

"Did you know Ohio has a booming born-again virgin industry?" Yan asks brightly.

"Uh. Industry?"

"Plastic surgery. Hymen restoration."

"Oh my _God_."

"Florida, too. One of my cousins umpity-times-removed popped her cherry over here at school, then freaked out about going back to Vietnam to marry the conservative boy her parents picked out for her, so she paid for a little procedure known as a hymenorrhaphy."

"That is fucked."

"No pun intended?"

"Why would you even..."

"Hey, don't judge. If it's a free choice and meaningful to them, who are you to say they shouldn't?"

"I would never prevent the exercise of free choice, but, sorry, totally reserving the right to judge."

"Then be judged!" booms an incisive voice from the doorway. Deborah Cohen drops six bags of groceries on the kitchen floor, beams and says, "Hi girls."

*

Later that night, Tina's mom knocks softly on her bedroom doorframe and says, "So, that conversation I walked in on."

"Hypothetical!" Tina squeaks.

Deborah smiles. "Okay."

"Mike and I—we haven't—but we're—"

"You're reaching the point where you might need to talk about it?"

Tina flops over and buries her face in her pillow. "We already tried talking about it once. It didn't go so well." Ominous silence. Tina registers how that sentence might sound to the mother of a girl, and hastens to clarify. "He didn't push me! I think. I think I might have pushed him."

"Oh, hon. Sex is scary for boys, too." She crosses into the room, sinks down on Tina's bed and pets her hair.

"I'm not scared."

Her mom steamrollers right over that one. "But it's good that you're trying to talk. That's important."

"It's just, like, _fraught_ , and I can't figure out anymore if it's fraught or I'm making it fraught or society's making me—us— _think_ it's fraught, or... gahhh!"

"Well, stop thinking about 'society,' for starters. Screw society. This is about nobody but you and Mike and what makes you both feel good and confident and happy. Did you know I didn't have sex until I was thirty-four?" Tina swallows air and prompts a coughing fit. Deborah blandly hands her the glass of water on her bedside table. "Part of the reason was medical, but I could have got around it if I'd really wanted to. I wasn't a prude. I just didn't care enough, and hadn't found anyone I wanted to let into my space that much. Your dad's a damned lucky man." Tina tries to grin at that. "I'm not saying you should wait that long," Deborah continues, "just that you can. There's no timeline. 'Normal' is a myth."

"Okay," Tina croaks. She wants to crack a joke about never needing to hear another word about her mother's sex life, except she actually feels better.

"And..." For the first time, her mother hesitates, betraying the fact that this is new conversational territory for her, too. She recovers quickly, though, and plows onward with the lecture. "It's not that oral sex isn't intimate. The difference isn't in the acts themselves; it's in the consequences. If something goes awry during vaginal sex, you could find yourself pregnant, so you have to decide that's a risk you're willing to take with him. Is, 'Mike, guess what, I'm pregnant,' a conversation you could trust him with? A situation you feel you could handle together?"

"I don't know."

"Well, there's as good a starting point as any." With that, her mom leans down and kisses her forehead. "You'll do. You're smart. I love you."

"Thanks, Mommy."

Tina crawls into her pajamas and curls up in bed with a book. She's just thinking of setting it aside and turning off the light when her phone rings. Mike.

"Hi," she says softly.

"Hi." Just as soft. "What're you doing?"

"Just reading."

"Anything good?"

"Pratchett," she tells him. Comfort reading.

"I'm sorry about this afternoon," says Mike in a rush, still soft.

" _I'm_ sorry," Tina counters. "I think I might have been kind of an asshole about it."

"No, no, you were totally right! We should talk about it. You just caught me by surprise."

"Are you sure? Because we don't have to—"

"Tina."

"Sorry."

"I've been thinking about it all afternoon."

"Oh God, I just got The Talk from my mother."

"Oh, no!"

"It was actually, kind of good? She basically just said, 'Go at your own pace.'"

"Oh. That's nice." He sounds sincere, and slightly impressed.

"Yeah."

"So, um, what _is_ your—"

"What do you think having sex is for Kurt and Blaine?"

" _What?_ Um. I'm not sure I'm that comfortable speculating."

"No! No, of course, I don't mean—I mean, in general. For gay people. Like, if you were gay, what would you have to do before you felt like you'd lost your virginity?"

"I don't know. It's whatever they want it to be, I guess."

"Don't you think that's sort of unfair? I mean, I'm totally not saying they have it better _generally speaking_ as gay guys, because, like, they probably deal with about ten times more bullshit than we do—like, what counts as sex, and who does what, and what it's supposed to say about them. But, I guess… they get to decide what's important for them in a way we don't? It's just expected, assumed, that when we lose our virginities to each other it'll mean one specific thing. And anyone who finds out we did it will know exactly what we did."

"When you put it that way," says Mike, "I do see the creep factor."

" _I know_ , right?"

"Tina, are you...are you circling around saying that you don't want to have, um, penetrative sex? At least right now? Because—"

"And by penetrative you're assuming penis-in-vagina and not me coming at you with a strap-on—" Tina shoots back.

"Uh," comes a small voice down the line.

Tina faceplants into her own lap. "Oh my god I am sorry. Mike. I—I get aggressive when I'm nervous." She pauses. "I didn't even know I was still nervous until now."

Mike clears his throat. "'s okay. And. I'm not necessarily taking that off the table. For someday." Tina's eyes widen. "But—and you can put this down to cultural brainwashing if you like—but I do think it's maybe not… beginner level."

"Michael Chang," Tina breathes, "I love you."

He laughs, sweetly.

"I do. I do want penetrat—I mean, plain, old, ordinary—"

"—heteronormative—" Mike interjects, and Tina bites her lip around a grin; _God_ , she loves this boy—

"—sex. With you."

*

He puts his nose right against her cotton underwear and breathes deeply. "Oh my God, Mike!" Tina squeaks, embarrassed.

"No, it's good, it's sort of—oceany? I like it. It's turning me on."

"Yeah?"

He mouths softly in answer.

"That feels really nice," Tina sighs. Mike kisses all over her thighs, soft, intent kisses followed by loud, smacking ones that make her cackle. Tina's fingers slide down inside her waistband. "Can I...? Do you want—?"

"Please," says Mike. She pushes her panties down to her knees, where Mike takes over, carefully slipping them all the way off and tossing them aside. His hands come back to her legs to stroke and pet, and when he nuzzles his face into the gap between her knees it's practically instinct to part them and let him sink back down close.

"Oh, wow. That is so _cool_."

"What?" she asks vaguely, and then shrieks because Mike has laid the flat of his tongue fully against her and licked a broad, thorough stripe from there to here. She feels herself changing under his scrutiny. Blood rushing in and making her tingle. Dampness seeping out. Mike starts to lift his hand from her thigh, then pauses and makes eye contact. "Are you good?"

Her legs twitch. It's _something_ , being on display—not bad, because she trusts him, she really does, so much, but just—"Um. Could I have a kiss?"

Mike's eyes gleam. "A kiss where, exactly?" He waggles his eyebrows, but he's already surging upward—so graceful, that thoughtless activation of muscle—and down to catch her mouth. She catches a whiff, followed by a taste of herself, and another laugh bubbles up in her for no good reason. She's doing this. _They_ are. 

"Okay, get back there," she orders, and shoves his head.

"Bossysocks," he tells her, and goes. He combs his fingers through her pubic hair, runs them all over, stroking and spreading, with his lips parted and an expression of intense interest on his face. "So," he breathes, "how do I get you off?"

 _Oh my god. Okay, then._ "Well...when I masturbate, it's kinda...rough? And, and repetitive. But not, like, direct—" She brings one hand down out of Mike's hair and strokes his nose, and then, breath hitching, herself. He licks her fingers and she squeals and wipes them on the sheets. After some starts and stops they fall into a sort of communicatory rhythm, Mike, licking, sucking, kissing, cradling her hips in his hands as she rolls them and squirms under his tongue.

"Is this good? This is so—oh." She clutches his hair again. "Oh my God I think I love this."

"Right there, right there, with your finger, like—" She sweeps his hand aside and takes over, rubbing light and fast over her clitoral shaft. "Ohhhh."

" _Me_ ," says Mike, and pushes his fingers against hers, forcing her to yield the territory, and she laughs at them swatting at each other. She clutches her own thighs and arches. He has it now, mimicking her motion, alternating between kissing and pulling back to stare. His harsh breaths fill the room. There—she cries out and heaves, and Mike pushes the heel of his hand against her, giving her something to grind against, and oh, it's perfect.

"That was the most beautiful, amazing thing I've ever seen in my life." He flops up next to her. His boxers are epically tented. She brushes her hand over him and he jerks.

"Can I suck you off?"

He considers for a moment, then chuckles and shakes his head. "Hand job? I'm not going to last ten seconds; I don't want to—that's not a first I want to waste."

"'Kay." She rolls and reaches, tugs his shorts down and takes him in hand. Kisses his ribs, meanders upward with her lips while smearing precome down his cock. True to his word, he starts groaning and bucking immediately. He comes, and she kisses his smiling mouth, at the same time.

*

Kurt knows, with a precision bordering at this point upon the absurd, how far they can go before they have to back off and grin shyly and find a different way to pass the time. He keeps waiting for Blaine to say something to move their alone-time adventures along further, or, God, even just slip up one day and land a handful of ass, but it's Blaine, not Kurt, who nearly always shuts them down first, before Kurt can even start to worry about either of them losing control. Initially, he'd thought Blaine was merely following his cues, gentleman that he is, but now Kurt wonders if, in certain ways, Blaine isn't even shyer than he. More fearful of doing the wrong thing.

An odd thought. Kurt wonders if he's going to have to do some pushing, himself. He's not sure he understands the rules, in that case; it's not the role he'd assumed he was going to play.

But. It... could work. He likes the idea of taking care of Blaine. Showing him how good he is for Kurt, how secure he makes him feel.

Kurt's alone, today. He'll head to the shop later to do some filing or inventory management or whatever needs doing, but for the moment he's got nowhere to be but his own sleep-rumpled bed. He turns his face to the side and sniffs deeply. Mostly he smells himself, his moisturizer and conditioner, but the reason this particular pillow is under his head is that Blaine was propped on it some fifteen hours ago, and if he buries his face determinedly enough, he can trick himself into thinking it still smells faintly of his boyfriend's herbal aftershave and gel.

He encourages the sense memory by rolling onto his side and stretching out his hand, mimicking the (compromising) position he'd been in yesterday. His eyes flutter shut and his jaw drops a little, and he squirms in his sheets. Blaine...

is an incredible kisser. Last spring he took an activity that barely made sense to Kurt (like, tongues, tongues waggling around outside their owners' mouths, how do you even?) and made it so—shockingly easy and unweird and, and—God, in retrospect it's the most obvious, but it was also the most surprising thing about kissing, for Kurt— _personal_. Kissing Blaine is personal, like having a conversation with Blaine is not like talking to anybody else. It's only more intense and private than their other modes of being. He wonders if all teenagers are doomed to have revelations this dumb.

For a long time. Huh. For a long time—most of Kurt's adolescent life, really, with a brief and ill-fated exception circa his crush on Finn—Kurt's fantasies have been vague. Thinking of his schoolmates was dangerous, porn was horrifying, and celebrity heartthrobs (his best bet) somehow always, when it came down to it, remote and unknowable. He could imagine them singling him out (serenades on balconies may have been a feature) and whisking him away; he could imagine very little after that. He didn't know what to imagine. He had no vocabulary.

They're no longer enough, last year's blurred, dreamy fantasies of anonymous lips and hands. The hands he wants are very specific: neat and piano-strong, nails trimmed short enough not to clack on the keys. It's so easy to remember them cupping his shoulders, smoothing warmly down his back. So why shouldn't he let his mind take them further? Over his ass, teasing at his belt.... _He is allowed_ , Kurt thinks. _He is allowed he is allowed he is_ allowed _to have sexual thoughts about his own boyfriend_. In fact, he's pretty sure that if he can't bring himself to imagine certain acts, acknowledge certain desires, in the privacy of his own mind, then he has no business trying to execute them in reality.

He touches his fingertips to his lips, then trails them down his throat. Collarbones, back and forth, ticklish. Back up, leaning into his own wrist, kissing himself, letting his lips cling and setting the blood beneath his skin abuzz. Blaine, kissing him, is flatteringly vocal. "Oh," he says sometimes, when he pulls back from Kurt's lips. Not, "Uh," or, "Mmm," or any of the delicious, small whimpers and sighs that escape from between their mouths, but that single, soft, fully-formed word, the purest articulation of amazement Kurt has ever heard. He can be cheeky and inventive, too, that boy—sometimes too inventive; the upside-down Spider-man experiment had made them both laugh so hard Kurt had choked on his own spit, which hadn't been sexy for anybody. But he loves that Blaine makes him laugh like that, that they can play like that, even in the midst of the very serious business of learning what gets each other hot.

What gets Kurt hot is...is....

He tips onto his back again, bites his lip and wriggles out of his silk boxers. The sheet twists around him; he kicks it down and away, shivering at the feel of it slipping over his skin. He can't help but let his hands follow its path, then loop back up over chest and belly in a lazy, light caress. He avoids his groin for the moment. Skims his hands, instead, over the hair on his thighs, rucking it up and smoothing it flat again. Breathes. Does it all again. He's highly aware of being naked in the center of his big, clean room. His door is locked (his eyes dart over, double-checking reflexively), but even in his solitude it feels alien and voluptuous.

Kurt sucks on his fingers and then runs them lightly down the center of his torso, thinking, "What if it were Blaine's damp lips, his pointed tongue?" The thought feels wild, precarious, nerve-wracking, but his imagination, given a single inch of leeway, latches on with a vengeance, and he squeezes his eyes shut, shaking, now, with arousal. He imagines Blaine, hair amok, mouth kissed red, looking up at him and saying, "Can I?" and, "Touch yourself while I do." He cannot imagine complying, showing this to Blaine. His bare body, yes, maybe, but the way he's touching himself? Seducing own body slowly, like the star of his own cheesecakey romance novel? Kurt gasps, just thinking of it.

And then he does it anyway. He pictures Blaine's eyes. He wants, he knows he's wanted, he lets himself feel Blaine's want, and it's so exciting that he bends his knees and plants his feet and _writhes_.

He sucks two fingers back into his mouth and presses on his tongue, trying to imagine the weight of Blaine there. The weight of his cock. The mechanics of his fantasy go a little haywire, skipping around the way dreams do. His want and Blaine's want tangle, dark eyes and still-sketchy physicality, heat and smell and _taste_ —he'd be smoother than the pads of Kurt's fingers, but maybe the salt would be not too dissimilar—? He shuts his eyes and breathes through his nose and pretends, and, without even being touched, his own cock throbs and leaks.

His hips lift, thrusting at air, and he can't, this is not going to last. He swipes his right hand up the underside of his cock and cups his fingers loosely over the head and Jesus he's _gone_ , curling and then jackknifing wide open on the bed. He shouts—a single, shockingly deep, guttural, "Uh!" then jumps in shock at the sound of his own voice, squeezing his cock and setting off another spasm. He rides it out, squeezes again and rides it out again, heaving and a little bewildered. He's not—he has not hithertofore been—a noisemaker. Even quarantined in his basement at the old house, two floors from anyone, he has gasped, and gulped, and wheezed into his pillow, but he's never been a screamer.

Kurt lies for quite some time, one hand cupped protectively over his own mess, the other splayed flat on the sheets.

Well, he thinks to himself, huffing and groping toward his nightstand for a tissue. Try to learn something new every day.

*

Thirty miles away, Blaine is innocent in thought and deed, seated at the piano in his cool, empty house, picking through Gnossienne no. 3 by Erik Satie.

It's a weird piece, littered with unlikely intervals and accidentals, and lacking a time signature. Usually, Blaine prefers the dawn-song stillness of the Gymnopédies, but today he's got Kurt on his mind, and Kurt's a Gnossienne kind of guy: subtler, less predictable, more technically challenging. _Take careful counsel_ , Satie instructs where other composers make do with _con espressione_ and _mezzo-piano. Arm yourself with clairvoyance._

He'll meet up with Kurt later on, after his shift at the shop. Meanwhile, he has at least three hours to while away. He's brewed iced tea with mint from the window boxes, fished the last box of Girl Scout cookies out of the chest freezer in the basement, run the dishwasher and the laundry. He's read all the books on Dalton's summer reading list and started in on Kurt's just for the hell of it. He has wondered if Kurt finds _The Pearl_ as obnoxious as he does. He'll have to ask. He's betting he'll be able to make Kurt laugh.

_Alone, for a moment_

Blaine hasn't taken a piano lesson since enrolling at Dalton, but he keeps in shape. Unbothered by a teacher who wants him to practice his Bach inventions, some of his skills have slipped, but he's made up the difference on his improv, facility with chords, and his playing by ear. It's more in line with what he actually wants to do with his music in the long run.

Kurt is a decent pianist himself, though he rarely advertises it. He'd certainly managed to startle Blaine, one rainy day in the Dalton common room, blithely taking over the basic chords of an Alicia Keys tune when Blaine had leapt up to test some choreography. They'd already been dating for a month. Blaine wonders what _oops-I-never-mentioned-that?_ talent he'll spring on him when they're fifty. He's reasonably sure, by this point, that Kurt's never going to run out of surprises.

Kurt doesn't think of himself as a pianist, though. He is, by his own admission, too uncoordinated to accompany his own singing, and he's uninterested in piano as a solo instrument.

_So as to create a hollow_

He's practically the opposite of Blaine, that way. Kurt will stand under a spotlight, hands at his sides, nothing and no one behind him, and live or die by his own bare voice. Blaine—ironically, for a guy with a case full of trophies etched "soloist," Blaine has never considered himself very good at being alone.

And the trouble is, his conceptions of aloneness keep changing. Lately, they all seem to hinge on the presence or absence of one person. He's become the guy who counts hours until he can see him again. The spring semester at Dalton was a discombobulating loop between torment and delight.

There is, of course, an obvious solution.

_Very lost_

Dalton or McKinley. It feels a little like asking him to choose between the blazer and naked skin. Navy might not be his best color, and it's not a terribly _breathable_ object, but having such a solid, dependable layer of insulation between himself and the world has been no small grace, these past two years.

Then again, he's older and sturdier than he's been, and hasn't Kurt been unwrapping him anyway, gently, inexorably, since the day they met?

And hasn't it felt like relief?

_Carry this further_

He leans into the song, bare toes curling over the chilly metal of the damper pedal.

He loves Kurt, but he's aware of just how demanding he can be. Compromise isn't really part of Kurt's active vocabulary. Kurt both demands authenticity and believes in fairy tales, yet he's as capable as anyone of getting muddled about which is which.

He loves Kurt intensely, utterly, and, if he's forced to admit it, in a way he thinks he probably recognizes. It's the same stunned stupid way that his dad loves his mother. He remembers being jealous, as a child, of his parents' attention, his small, foolish, nervously liberal father and his brilliant, distractible mother, and their unlikely mutual besottedness at the expense of everyone else around them. It is not an environment he particularly wants to recreate, should he have kids of his own, but he's coming into a sympathy for them that he never had before. Love is heady. Nerve-wracking and raw and glorious. Like a fairytale. Crash or grow wings.

_Open the head_

The boy to whom he had the temerity to say, "Courage," makes Blaine feel alight with it. Kurt forces Blaine, by his sheer existence, by the way he lives his life, to dream big. Not ambitiously, because Dalton surely breeds ambition, but broadly, with a certain wildness. He wants to know who he'll become with Kurt close by.

That, _that_. That's what it feels like: being, with Kurt, becomes becoming.

He likes himself better, struggling at Kurt's side, than safe without him.

You can't carry a piano around with you. You travel light, you keep the music in yourself, and you hope you'll find a new instrument wherever you land.

On top of the piano, Blaine's phone chimes with an incoming text. He knows who it'll be, but he ignores it for one last moment to finish out the song.

In typical Satie fashion, it loops right back to the opening phrase, but it flows off Blaine's fingers differently, now, with the song behind it, recontextualized. The final cadence lifts like a question mark. He withdraws from the keys, and the pedals warmed with body heat, and sets his hands quietly on his thighs while the music ghosts itself once around the wood-furnished room.

The phone lets out a second impatient _chirrr!_ Blaine blinks awake, smiles, and picks it up.

_Cover the sound._

*

They do it, _the_ it, the one everybody snickers about in middle school, on the last Saturday in August, in Mike's bedroom, while his parents are out furniture-shopping in Columbus. It's pre-planned to a slightly ludicrous degree ("We could have lunch together!" "As long as we don't eat anything too heavy." "You do realize this is a booty call, not a marathon, right?")

Now Tina is braced on her knees over Mike's body. "Just, take your time," Mike puffs out like it's rehearsed.

"It's okay!" Tina says breathlessly. "You're smaller than a cucumber!" and feels Mike's hands freeze at her waist. Tina freezes, too, and wishes that her boyfriend were suddenly struck—much, much dumber than he is. She peeks. Mike is staring at her with both eyebrows up and an enormous, gleefully childish grin smeared across his face. "We talking pickling cuke or English?" he inquires earnestly. "Because in terms of length—"

She shuts him up by grasping his cock in one hand, putting her thigh muscles to good use, and sinking down on him.

Of course it isn't quite as simple as that. It hasn't occurred to her to play with the cucumber from this angle, and there are a few awkward seconds of balancing and searching and woggling, but Mike gets with the program _fast_ , grin dropping away, hands flying to her waist. Just that contact, the feel of those broad, steady hands, even though he isn't actually taking any of her weight, makes something in Tina relax, and then, with a slide and two soft, startled groans, they fit.

Tina lifts her hands and then tries to decide where to put them—but before she can lay them on Mike's chest, he catches them in both of his and lifts them to his lips. Cheeseball.

After that, everything happens remarkably quickly. Tina tentatively rocks her hips, and Mike makes a panicked face, and then his hips are jerking and he's making a breathy, almost feminine series of noises, and then he slumps, eyes squinched shut and breathing labored. Her boyfriend just came inside her.

"Fuck."

"Can you—?" He shifts awkwardly, and Tina says, "Oh!" and levers herself up and over, leaving him to deal with the condom clinging to his softening cock. Mike deals, frowning.

"So how thoroughly weird would I be if I said I don't want that to count as losing my virginity?"

Tina, fussing with the bed pillows, pauses. "Then...what would it count as?"

"Losing my dignity?"

Tina snorfles. "Just because it didn't go according to your perfect plan doesn't mean you get a do-over!"

"Tell that to several thousand born-again virgins in Florida!"

She looks at him, looks at his face, long enough for him to relent and catch and hold her eye. "Seriously, don't—don't erase that. I don't want to. Just, let's not stop it there."

Then Tina leans over and kisses Mike, sliding one hand into his thick hair.

And soon enough he's hard again and she's groping for the roll of condoms and fitting one over him, fingers trembling not with nerves, now, but impatience. She lets him go on top this time, and he slides in so gently, her fingers guiding him. It's just a little sore, in a way that feels kind of good, but she makes him withdraw anyway and add a bit of lube. Yeah, good, as he slips in again, that's good. Tina wraps her legs around Mike's hips, and Mike props himself with his elbows on either side of her and meets her eyes for a long moment.

"You feel incredible," he murmurs.

"I love you," she says, but he's saying it at the exact same time, and then they're smiling at each other so hard it hurts.

This time, it lasts longer. This time, there's time to run her hands all over Mike's beautiful, precious, _present_ body, and haul him down to kiss her, and finally, when Mike starts panting, "Tina! Tina!" wiggle her fingers down and stroke herself to orgasm as he falls stunningly apart before her eyes.

She takes his face in her hands, and presses their foreheads together. Mike's breath gusts hotly across her lips. She parts them, and nudges up to share that, too. His body tenses a couple times, like he's trying to muster the energy to take back some of his weight. She caresses him languidly, and when she reaches the small of his back, he arches up into it, flashing a hand down as he remembers the condom down there that needs to come with.

"B r b," he whispers, and rolls away. When he returns, catching her in the middle of a great, yawning stretch, Tina looks over and is stunned to see tears in Mike's eyes. He sniffs, and grins at her. "I thought it'd be you," he admits. "You're the one who's always leaking tears all over the place, even when you're happy. I was kinda braced for it. I forgot to brace for me."

Tina reaches out for him with two hands and a leg. She doesn't feel like crying at all. Instead, starting from deep in her body, spinning and boiling upward like a waterfall in reverse, is a laugh.

*

The tears do come, but later, when she is alone. She thinks about it for a minute, then takes them out of her loneliness and down to the kitchen, where she can hear her mother clattering with the tea kettle.

"Water for two, please," she says from the doorway, and wanders over to the cupboard to get a bag of something that isn't her mother's sticks and berries. Deborah looks at her daughter sidelong, but doesn't speak until they're both seated at the table with steaming mugs. Then she doesn't speak some more.

Just because the tactic is unsubtle doesn't mean it's ineffective, or even unwelcome. Tina lets her tea cool enough to sip, then blows out a big, steadying breath across its surface and keeps her eyes on the ripple pattern. "Mike and I—"

And then she stops with her mouth open, having neglected to think of what to call it. In her mind, it just is—this thing, this amazing thing that took place between them—but to talk about it, one requires words. Made love? Accurate, but ridiculous. Had sex: too neutral, and not the quickest way to reassure her mother. Went all the way together. Better. But how can she talk of _going all the way_ when what they did feels like a beginning?

Instead, she just lifts her eyes to her mother's face in time to see Deborah read her expression flawlessly—and in time to see a wave of tenderness wash over her features before she schools herself into something more contained. Deborah is not the crier in the family, but her eyes stay a little bright.

"So do you feel like you've passed a milestone, then?"

"Yeah. But—not the one I was expecting. It was, like a milestone in understanding? I don't know how to explain. What was important about it wasn't what we did, but how we felt. And that part wasn't a milestone. Just," she shrugged, "a thing that's true."

*

Kurt's hands are hot and a little sweaty, pushing up under Blaine's shirt in the dimness of his bedroom. The door is dutifully cracked and Carole asleep down the hall, but it's hard to remember why these facts are important when Kurt is in his arms, filling his senses. He shimmies, tugs, and then they're both shirtless and plastered together again, whimpering softly at the feel of skin.

They've seen not hide nor hair of each other in two weeks; it feels like an age. Just the smell of Blaine, lemon balm and raspberry tea and his own earthy self, clean and warm and herbal, makes Kurt want to burrow into him and never leave. Blaine rolls them, hands greedily urging Kurt to go on top, and when his knee shifts Kurt lurches down uncontrolled, and their groins align just so.

"Oh! Oh my—sorry, sorry," Blaine squeaks, and tries to tilt himself away, which, as he's pinned, doesn't work in quite the manner intended. Kurt moans and grabs unpurposefully at Blaine's shoulder. Blaine seems to decide that the best course of action is to go absolutely still, so Kurt follows suit, so there they are, just warm breath and pulsing blood and shy, startled eye contact.

"Shh," says Kurt. "It's—it's fine."

"It's fine," Blaine echoes.

Kurt lowers his head and touches their lips together, whispers, "You feel good," against the seam.

"Good," Blaine echoes, and twines his arms around Kurt's back and kisses.

They don't move their hips much—just the smallest inevitable shifts and slides, shaky and savored. But Kurt's weight, and the minute, gorgeous friction of Blaine's thigh hitching just a little higher, are a promise. _This. Us. You and me._ They have time to get things right.

**Author's Note:**

> *Sam's campfire song is [Americans in Corduroys](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvw-oHpKUz4) by Jeffrey Foucault.
> 
> **[Gnossienne no. 3](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMjQFUmFc7c) by Erik Satie
> 
> The title comes from "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity", a poem by John Tobias.


End file.
